Tag Archives: plagiarism

My experience today reading Joe Konrath’s “Writers Code of Ethics” was probably exactly what he intended. From points one through three—never write or pay for reviews of your own work—I was in complete agreement. From points four through six—don’t ask friends or fans to review your work—I was thinking, “wow, that’s pretty strict.” By point nine—”I will never allow anyone to send out copies of my books to be reviewed”— I was suspicious. Long before I got to his twenty-third and final point of ethics, I realized he had veered into satire.

What spurred Konrath’s gradual escalation into ethical absurdity was a manifesto of sorts by a group of authors condemning other authors behind a recent rash of “sock-puppet,” or faked, and purchased book reviews. His aim, I take it, was not to defend dishonest marketing, but to warn us against mob instincts:

“All of you pointing your fingers and proclaiming your piety? Get back to working on your books, not judging your peers.”

Viewing ethical mistakes in black and white makes life simple. But we can learn more, and become better people and better writers, by trying to understand the complex intentions and motivations behind those errors.

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, I’ve been deeply bothered for the last few days by the uproar over Jonah Lehrer’s reuse of his writing in various publications. I know almost nothing about Lehrer other than what I’ve read in the many stories about his so-called “self-plagiarism,” and have no position on his work to defend. I also agree with the idea that reusing bits of your previously published work in new articles is pretty lame. But the suggestion many writers have made that his practice is akin to plagiarism is simply wrong. It confuses quality standards with moral ones.

The controversy began with the Romenesko story last week that in a number of blog posts for the New Yorker, Lehrer had reused some paragraphs he had written for an earlier article in the Wall Street Journal. Subsequently several more instances of similar recycling from other publications were uncovered. (Steve Buttry, in the course of reflecting on his own (transparent) habits of repetition, provides a good summary of the matter.)

These are interesting findings, well worth public discussion. But they are more the material of literary criticism than of ethical analysis. They tell us that Lehrer’s range as a writer is less broad than we thought, perhaps, and that he doesn’t always have fresh insights. But they don’t tell us he’s a thief.

And possibly no one is saying that, quite. In his Slate piece on Lehrer, for instance, Josh Levin uses the phrase “self-plagiarism” somewhat jokingly. “Writing the same words twice” may not be a moral offense, he seems to say, but “it will piss off your editors” and “disappoint your customers.” Such “self-plagiarism is bad for the brand,” he concludes—not, as we might expect from real plagiarism, bad for the soul.

Similarly, while using the P-word liberally, Poynter‘s Kelly McBride suggests that Lehrer’s sin is less than mortal: “Had he stolen words from someone else—plagiarized-plagiarized rather than self-plagiarized—we’d all be calling it quits.” Instead, his readers are merely disappointed; their “enthusiasm wilts.”

Fine. If I’d been a Lehrer reader, I might be disappointed too. But to use the word plagiarism even jokingly or ironically in connection with what he did veers perilously close to character assassination. The damage it does exceeds any done by Lehrer’s recycling.

When this careless or invidious habit spreads to the New York Times, which wrote that Lehrer “has become the latest high-profile journalist to be caught up in a plagiarism scandal,” you know it’s excessive. It doesn’t matter that Times reporter Jennifer Schuessler immediately added that the scandal included “a counterintuitive twist that could come right out of his own books: The journalist he has been accused of borrowing from is himself.” What many readers will take away from this overly clever sentence is the false notion that Lehrer is a plagiarist.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this story is how many of the commenters on these critics’ posts reject the association with plagiarism. Some don’t even object to Lehrer’s reuse of his writing. In contrast to the critics’ high dudgeon, their attitude seems to be, “big deal.”

Is the critical reaction to Lehrer possibly influenced by the fact that he is very young, very smart, and very successful? Well, consider this. If a journalist we’d never heard of, like Paresh Jha, accused of fabricating sources and quotes, had instead been accused of recycling his own sentences, would we be reading about it now on Poynter? I think not.

I’m leaving open the possibility that I just don’t get it. Maybe there is a portentous ethical and moral issue in repeating yourself. But even if there is, its magnitude surely falls well short of plagiarism, and the term shouldn’t be used even humorously or ironically to describe Lehrer. It’s reasonable, given what he did, to call him a bad writer. But that’s no basis for calling him a bad person.

In yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, theater critic Charles McNulty wrote a marvelous column inspired by his objections to the Roland Emmerich movie, Anonymous. Though he disputes the movie’s thesis that no one with Shakespeare’s lower middle class roots could have written such great masterpieces, that wasn’t his aim in writing. His goal, rather, was to remind us that the Bard’s works were not simply the output of an individual, but the result of a collaboration with a crowd of other writers, actors, scholars, and editors.

Nothing McNulty tells us would surprise even a casual student of Shakespeare. But without perhaps meaning to, he offers some enlightening arguments against those who doubt the validity or value of social media.

While Shakespeare “is indisputably the master architect of his work—the genius in chief, if you will,” McNulty writes, “his plays took a literary village.” His plays, that is, were the result of collaboration and conversation with predecessors, contemporaries, and even later generations. His plots and characters were frequently borrowed, his words undoubtedly shaped by interactions with his actors, and the final form of his output determined by later scholars and editors.

He was a master aggregator, one who would certainly be accused of plagiarism if he was a 21st-century artist. But the accusation would be false. As McNulty writes, what “we would call plagiarism today was considered borrowing back then, a practice cradled in the curriculum.” Shakespeare didn’t simply borrow, though: “Whatever he touched, he alchemized. His poetic and dramatic instincts could spin gold out of dross.” A useful reminder, perhaps, that the best aggregators improve the things they borrow.

Not only would our age treat a contemporary version of Shakespeare as a plagiarist, it would also spurn him as a copyright pirate. The Renaissance, McNulty notes, was “an age unconstrained by modern copyright laws.” As Mike Masnick asked earlier this year, would Shakespeare today “be able to produce any of his classic works, since they’d all be tied up in lawsuits over copyright infringement”?

No, I’m not defending plagiarism, or opposing copyright. But I am saying that an excessive focus on those issues is bad for our culture. Accordingly, I will borrow as my own McNulty’s eloquent conclusion: “Shakespeare’s legacy is pretty much assured. That of our own age is still up for grabs.”

For anyone interested in the ethics of new-media journalism, the past 24 hours have been painfully instructive. For me, it’s been a reminder that in any ethical decision, you have to be guided by your heart as well as your head.

The episode began when, in response to an inquiry by a Columbia Journalism Review reporter, the Poynter Institute’s director of publications, Julie Moos, wrote a blog post criticizing Poynter’s celebrated columnist Jim Romenesko. According to Moos, Romenesko had a years-long habit of insufficiently attributing quoted comments. The episode concluded with Romenesko’s resignation, several months ahead of a planned retirement.

For those unfamiliar with these events, Nieman Lab’s Mark Coddington provides a superb overview. But the gist of the story is this: in summarizing what was written in other publications—essentially all he does or claims to do—Romenesko sometimes did not put quotation marks around verbatim quotes. For Moos, this was grounds not for dismissal, but a well-meaning but severe and public hand slapping. For almost everyone in journalism, her comments were an undeserved and self-important rebuke.

I admit to feeling some sympathy for Moos. The current climate of scandal mongering and blame placing make any public ethical decision difficult; no matter what she did, a large number of people would have second-guessed her.

I’m also very uncomfortable with the failure to use quotation marks around verbatim borrowings. When Steve Buttry, for whom I have boundless admiration and respect, argues that Romenesko’s fault was simply a punctuation problem, I find myself in the rare position of questioning his call. Leaving out a comma or semicolon can mean a difference between clarity and obscurity; leaving out a quotation mark can mean the difference between an original insight and blatant theft. I know that I’m nitpicking, and agree that Romenesko was absolutely not stealing. My point here is not to claim Buttry is wrong, but to demonstrate my mixed feelings.

I’m certain that Moos had similarly mixed feelings in deciding how to handle the discovery she was handed so unexpectedly. But it’s clear that she overreacted in reaching for what Theodore Bernstein used to call an atomic flyswatter. Like many a well-meaning but misguided official, she felt obliged to adopt a zero-tolerance policy for ethics. But in ethics, zero tolerance is, by its nature, unethical.

In a situation like this, the question that should be asked is not “What rules were broken?” but “Who was hurt?” The fact is, Romenesko’s occasional failure to use quotation marks hurts no one. It was not an issue of plagiarism, which does hurt people. As many of his supporters have pointed out, no one Romenesko ever covered has objected to his attribution habits. Their heart tells them that Moos’s reaction was wrong. I suspect hers does as well.

Neither the heart nor the head is an infallible guide; every moral decision involves some balance between the two. This time, Julie Moos got the balance wrong.